This disclosure relates generally to business process modeling, and more particularly to modeled service endpoints in business process model and notation (BPMN) tools.
Business Process Management (BPM) tools allow users to model, execute, and monitor your business processes based on a common process model. The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is an industry standard graphic notation for representing business process workflows. BPMN shows the end-to-end flow of a business process in a flowchart-type style, and is often used with a user-interface-oriented BPMN tool. One example of a BPMN tool is SAP's NetWeaver BPM component (NW BPM, also referred to as “Galaxy”), which is designed to help users improve the efficiency of business processes, reduce errors in complex repetitive tasks, and lower exception-handling costs. With SAP BPMN, users can compose process steps, define business rules and exceptions, model process flows using BPMN, execute process models efficiently, and support interaction with running processes via personalized user interfaces or interactive forms. Users can also monitor business processes to improve process quality and efficiency.
Tools such as NW BPM provide a process composer that enables process architects and developers to create and debug executable business process models. Each business process model clearly defines the rules and exceptions governing the process steps that are performed by people or systems in response to specific business events. BPMN processes in NW BPM can be exposed as services, e.g. as web services. This means that once the BPMN process has been deployed, it can be initiated via a web service call. Providing a BPMN process as a service is referred to as “service provisioning.” In service provisioning use cases, the consumer can initiate an exposed BPMN process by sending a message to the corresponding endpoint. Service endpoints are well-known in the web service domain like the Web Service Description Language (WSDL), and define a URL under which the service can be called.
However, exposing a BPMN process as a service also requires an endpoint. What is needed is an ability to model such an endpoint in a BPMN tool, ideally by means of BPMN constructs, without having to leave the BPMN domain, and without having to have the expertise of the service domain or to move to a different tool, like a service modeling tool, to service-enable the BPMN process.